Chalmers Johnson - Nemesis - The Last Days of the American Republic

During the Gulf War of 1991, the United States drove Iraq from Kuwait but stopped short of invading Iraq itself. Nonetheless, President George H. W. Bush and his national security adviser, General Brent Scow-croft, were determined to do everything in their power to make postwar Iraq ungovernable, to stimulate revolt within the country, and to force Saddam Hussein from office.During the war itself, the United States dropped some ninety thousand tons of bombs on Iraq in the space of forty-three days, intentionally destroying the civilian infrastructure, including eighteen of twenty electricity-generating plants and the water-pumping and sanitation systems. 41Dr. Thomas Nagy, a professor at George Washington University, analyzed a large number of declassified Defense Intelligence Agency documents on the bombing and concluded that American officials were well aware that the purposeful destruction of Iraq’s civilian water sanitation systems would cause increased outbreaks of disease and high rates of child mortality. 42The primary document, “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” dated January 22, 1991, argues that Iraq’s rivers “contain biological materials, pollutants, and are laden with bacteria. Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur.” Later documents state that the sanctions imposed after the war explicitly embargoed the importation of chlorine in order to prevent the purification of drinking water.

A Washington Post analysis of the air war published on June 23, 1991, quoted typical, although unnamed, Pentagon strategists on the bombing campaign, one of whom suggested that” [t]he definition of innocents gets to be a little bit unclear.... They do live there, and ultimately people have some control over what goes on in their country.” Another air force planner asserted, “We wanted to let people know. Get rid of this guy and we’ll be more than happy to assist in rebuilding. We’re not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime. Fix that, and we’ll fix your electricity.” 43In 1995, Colonel John A. Warden III wrote in Airpower Journal, “[Destruction] of these [electric power] facilities shut down water purification and sewage treatment plants. As a result, epidemics of gastroenteritis, cholera, and typhoid broke out, leading to perhaps as many as 100,000 civilian deaths and a doubling of the infant mortality rate.” 44A team from the Harvard School of Public Health suggested in May 1991 that “at least 170,000 children under five years of age will die in the coming year from the delayed effects” of the bombing. 45

The bombing itself violated international humanitarian law and made the United States liable to charges of war crimes. Article 54 (2) of the “Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol 1), June 8, 1977,” explicitly states, “It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as food-stuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.” 46As noted earlier, the United States is not a signatory of Protocol 1, but this does not absolve it of the charge that its behavior was profoundly immoral.

The sanctions themselves reinforced and deepened what the bombing began. Jacob Hornberger, president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, quotes State Department officials who helped negotiate U.N. support for our actions as saying that these were the “toughest, most comprehensive sanctions in history.” 47On August 2, 1990, the United States and Britain obtained U.N. Security Council Resolution 661 freezing all of Iraq’s foreign assets and authorizing the cutting off of all trade. This embargo lasted until the Anglo-American invasion of 2003. In its history, the U.N. has imposed economic sanctions only fourteen times (twelve of them since 1990), but according to Joy Gordon, the leading authority on the subject, “only those sanctions on Iraq have been comprehensive, meaning that virtually every aspect of the country’s imports and exports is controlled.” 48The American and British governments claimed not to have sequestered imports of food and medicine—hence Albright’s pretense that all Saddam Hussein had to do was comply with the U.N. to preserve the health of his people—but the two allies so restricted Iraqi exports that it had no money to buy such necessities. Columbia University professor Richard Garfield, an epidemiologist and one of the leading analysts of the effects of sanctions on Iraq, says that “Iraq’s legal foreign trade was cut by an estimated ninety percent by sanctions.” 49In particular Iraq was not allowed to import any of the parts it needed to repair its electrical and water purification systems.

The United States and Britain went to extraordinary lengths to keep U.N. documentation of what was happening inside Iraq from being made public. But the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) nonetheless monitored the situation, and in 1995, its researchers wrote to the Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Society, that 567,000 Iraqi children were estimated to have died as a result of sanctions. That figure may have been an overestimate, but it led to the U.N.’s “oil for food” program in 1996, which was supposed to remedy shortages of food and medical supplies. It did not work out that way, however, because the U.N. banked the proceeds from the Iraqi oil sales it now permitted in New York and skimmed off 34 percent to pay Kuwaiti claims of war damage against Iraq as well as its own expenses. The United States insisted that a further 13 percent go to the Kurdish autonomous area in the north. There was thus much less money available than the public was led to believe.

In addition, the U.S. government reserved the right to veto or delay any items Iraq ordered, exercising that power often and in secret. As Joy Gordon, who teaches philosophy at Fairfield University and is a prolific writer on the Iraq sanctions, noted, “In September 2001 nearly one third of water and sanitation and one quarter of electricity and educational-supply contracts were on hold. Between the springs of 2000 and 2002, for example, holds on humanitarian goods tripled.” Among the items the United States stopped from entering Iraq in the winter of 2001 were dialysis, dental and firefighting equipment, water tankers, milk and yogurt production equipment, and printing machines for schools. 50

Anupama Rao Singh, the United Nations Children’s Fund representative in Baghdad, observed that food shortages were virtually unknown in Iraq before the sanctions, but that from 1991 to 1998, “children under five were dying from malnutrition-related diseases in numbers ranging from a conservative 2,600 per month to a more realistic 5,357 per month.” 51Using his 1999 study, “Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children,” as well as other studies and his own later recalculations, Richard Garfield estimated that, through 2000, the sanctions had killed approximately 350,000 Iraqi children. 52This is the most widely accepted figure today. When Denis Halliday, the United Nations coordinator in Iraq, resigned in 1998 to protest the effects of the sanctions, he condemned them as “a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq” and called their implementation “genocide.” 53Given that the United States had starved the Iraqis for over a decade and caused the deaths of several hundred thousand of their children, one wonders why former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz and others believed American invading forces would be welcomed as liberators.